Buzz words.. They’re unavoidable. One of my favorites from way back:synergy.

There’s a lot of discussion lately of “Web 2.0.”

You see it in web application reviews: “The web 2.0 of bookmarking” or “a web 2.0 redesign.”

Web 2.0 means different things depending on context. Some argue that the term’s definition is so vague/complex that it’s unusable.

It’s the technology of websites. It’s the latest-greatest use of client-side scripting, CSS, and the Document Object Model. It’s meant to be a version of the world wide web. The collective current version. The reinvention of the web as it was known some 6+ years ago.

In a blog article that got me started on this subject (Why there’s no such thing as Web 2.0) the author argues that Web 2.0 is not a “space” or a category that a site/company falls into.

I agree with that. I would never use the term “Web 2.0″ in a pitch. Web 2.0 technology doesn’t make you special. Its expected — its whats current.

I think it will be easier to understand Web 2.0 when there’s Web 3.0, but please, lets not jump on the buzzword bandwagon.

Yesterday, a warehouse near our offices had a three alarm fire. I took a bike ride over there early this morning just to see what was left. It sure looked tragic. I found out after reading the article above that the building was condemned this morning. I really feel for Adcor, but I’m glad things were contained to the warehouse and no one got hurt.

It reminds me though of how important off-site backups are. If you have a software business, a fire could be disastrous if you don’t have your data backed up in multiple locations.

I found an interesting article a few weeks ago over at Expat Software discussing how 2 weeks vacation time is simply what your employer will pay you for, but not what you are limited to. If you’re willing, taking an unpaid vacation is always an option. If you play it right.

As a business owner, I want someone to LOVE working for me. I’d give (do give) my employees every benefit possible. Making that extra $200 or $2000 dollars just so my employee is miserable is no way to go. So that said, I’d completely respect someone taking time to pursue something they felt is worthwhile, so long as they don’t leave the company at a major loss. There’s simply a balance to be made — one that larger companies without a startup mentality might never come to see.

But that luxury comes at a price. You have to be respectful of the company you work for. Time away isn’t simply time you aren’t being productive on whatever project it was you were working on. Even if it’s unpaid, you’re still receiving health, dental, vision, 401k, and other benefits. That’s when things start becoming a little less fair to your employer, so be mindful and respectful of the costs of simply having an employee — we’re not just paying your salary.

Using Apache’s mod_deflate module, I’ve significantly lowered page size and load times on a few Fusion Bay projects and my personal website. Some load times have more than doubled in speed, from an intense loading time of 4-5 seconds to a measly 1 second.

The crazy thing about the pages that used to take a while to load was I always assumed it was the computer slowing things down due to a large amount of text to be rendered, not the size. I simply never paid attention! How silly.

I understand there are some issues with HTTP compression and older browsers that don’t support it properly, however I think this is a very unlikely scenario for 99.9% of our viewer-ship.

For more information on mod_deflate you can check out the Apache Documentation.

I personally used the simplest configuration possible, opting to do the following:

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    SetOutputFilter Deflate

The staff here at Fusion Bay read a lot of blogs. A few we read are written by popular Venture Capitalists — not because we’re looking for investments, but because they’re interesting to read and seem to have breaking news about new web services and technology companies.

I came across an article today on “The Penny Gap” which I thought was worth a mention: It talks about consumer based web applications and the difference in free vs paid-subscription revenue models.

The article talks about the negative trend of price vs adoption… the more you charge, the fewer subscriptions you receive. That seems logical: fewer consumers can afford your service the more expensive it is. But I wonder: Is there a price point that might increase your adoption? Will more consumers subscribe to something priced higher because they perceive it as higher quality? Or are higher quality things just more expensive?